The Pain of Words: Narratives of Suffering in Slavic Cultures
Princeton University
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
May 9-11, 2008
http://slavic.princeton.edu/events/calendar/detail.php?ID=1767

The conference is free and open to the public.

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

May 9, 2008

1:00 - 3:00 Panel 1: TRAUMATIZED NATIONS
Chair: Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton)

Kevin Platt (U of Pennsylvania)
Greatness and Terror: Patriotic Identity and Trauma

Aida Vidan (Harvard U)
To Remember or to Forget: Narratives of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s

Julie Fairbanks (U of Akron)
Memory and Sorrow: The Caucasian War and Adyg Narratives of Suffering

Discussant: Alexander Etkind (Cambridge U)

3:15 - 5:15 Panel 2: STYLIZED VIOLENCE
Chair: Petre Petrov (Princeton U)

Dunja Popovic (Harvard U)
"The Banner of My Blood": Pain and Ideology in Soviet Socialist Realism

Harriet Murav (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Real Men and Phantom Stories: Pain and Prosthesis in Soviet War Literature

Yulia Minkova (NYU/Drew U)
Tortured Language: The Economy of Violence in Soviet Discourse

Discussant: Sibelan Forrester (Swarthmore College)

5:30 - 6:45 KEYNOTE ADDRESS:
Cathy Caruth, Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Emory University.

May 10, 2008

9:00 - 11:00 Panel 3: INJURED BODIES
Chair: Devin Fore (Princeton U)

Ilya Kalinin (Smolny College, St. Petersburg)
Injuries of Detachment: Russian Formalists, Leo Tolstoy, and Battlefield Surgery

Lilya Kaganovsky (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Male Hysteria: The Socialist Realist Body in Pain

Irina Sandomirskaja (University College of Södertörn)
Stealing Word and Being Stolen by Words: The Deaf-Blind Body Performing Language

Rolf Hellebust (U of Nottingham)
Suffering and Seeing in the Classic Soviet Production Novel: Valentin Kataev's "Time, Forward!"

Discussant: Caryl Emerson (Princeton U)

11:15 - 1:15 Panel 4: ACHING SOUNDS
Chair: Margaret Beissinger (Princeton)

Soelve Curdts (Princeton U)
Absolute for Death: Music, Pain, and "the End of all Things"

Krista Hegburg (Rutgers U)
The Veracious Voice: The Romani Holocaust and the Politics of Commensuration in the Czech Republic

Maria Cizmic (U of South Florida)
Russian Avant-garde Piano Performance as an Expression of Cultural Trauma during Glasnost

Discussant: Boris Gasparov (Columbia U)

2:00 - 4:00 Panel 5: REMEMBERED CAMPS
Chair: Ksana Blank (Princeton U)

Manuela Consonni (Hebrew U)
Knowledge and Pain in the Lager and in Gulag Writings: A Contribution to the History of the Ruled

Cathy Frierson (U of New Hampshire)
"Fortitude" Trumps "Suffering": Oral Testimonies of Children of the "Enemies of the People" in the Soviet Union

Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (Columbia U)
Pain and Memory: Narrating the Gulag

Denis Kozlov (Dalhousie U)
Responding to Solzhenitsyn: Prison Camp Experiences in Readers' Letters to Novyi Mir from the 1960s.

Discussant: Mark Lipovetsky (U of Colorado at Boulder)

4:15 - 6:15 Panel 6: WOUNDED CITIES
Chair: Serguei Oushakine (Princeton)

Dieter De Bruyn and Michel Dobbeleer (Ghent U)
Cities of Suffering/Places of Pain: Translating Trauma after/through Leningrad and Warsaw

Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)
Dis-Figurations of the Siege: The Skeleton, The Fatty, and the Other

Emiliya Karaboeva (Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria)
The Fabric of Pain: Bulgarian Street Posted Obituaries

Sergii Mirnyi (Ukraine)
Overcoming Chernobyl: Narrative as Means of Recovery

Discussant: Nancy Ries (Colgate U)

7:15 FILM SCREENING: The Blockade (dir. Sergei Loznitsa, 2005, 52 min)

May 11, 2008

9:15 - 11:15 Panel 7: TORMENTED PERFORMANCES
Chair: Olga Hasty (Princeton U)

David Goldfarb (EES Online, Institute for Global Politics, Freie Universität Berlin)
Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, and the Sublime in the Polish Afterwar Avant-garde

Elena Baraban (U of Manitoba)
Framing Suffering: The War in Soviet Film of the Stalin Era

Vieda Skultans (U of Bristol)
The Politics of Inebration and Performative Narratives in Post-Soviet Society

Discussant: Helena Goscilo (U of Pittsburgh)

11:30 - 1:30 Panel 8: CULTIVATED PAIN
Chair: Mischa Gabowitsch (Princeton U)

Brian Baer (Kent State U)
The Politics of Pain: Homosexuality and Cultural Citizenship in Post-Soviet Russia

Dragan Kujundzic (U of Florida)
Empire, Race, and Pain: Bosnia, Kosovo, 'the Serbs' and the Pain of the Muslim Other

Jarrett Zigon (Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology)
The Suffering Self and Other: Ethical Practices and Russian Orthodox Church Drug Rehabilitation

Discussant: Ellen Chances (Princeton)

1:30 - 2:00 Concluding Remarks

Program Committee:

Serguei Oushakine (Princeton), Devin Fore (Princeton), Petre Petrov (Princeton), Alexander Etkind (Cambridge/Princeton), Nancy Ries (Colgate/Institute for Advanced Study).